Cryptogam biodiversity dynamics under climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic poles

Earth’s polar regions are warming at unprecedented rates. Antarctica is experiencing rapid regional warming, and the Arctic has warmed up to four times the global average. In response, vascular plants have experienced shifts in species’ abundance and distribution.

Polar regions host large richness of cryptogam species (bryophytes and lichens), which are essential ecosystem regulators that contribute to nutrient cycling, soil moisture and energy balance.

Despite these crucial roles and expectations that cryptogams can be seriously affected by climate change, taxonomical challenges hinder our understanding of their current trends.

BIPOLAR will tackle this knowledge gap by quantifying polar cryptogams’ climatic niches to understand their potential for climate change adaptation.

Both poles contain similar habitats shaped by extreme conditions, but the Arctic is warming more rapidly than Antarctica, and ecological processes have been more extensively documented there.

BIPOLAR is an interdisciplinary project that will provide a window into the future of Antarctic cryptogams by using the Arctic as a sentinel region via bipolar cryptogam species (i.e., present at the two poles).

BIPOLAR will combine a variety of methods and data (i.e., palaeoecology, open-access datasets, fieldwork and Bayesian statistics), and employ historical and current data to inform future projections.

The three objectives of BIPOLAR are: 1) Compiling and standardising bipolar cryptogam data from multiple sources, 2) Quantifying past, present and future macro- and micro-climatic niches, and identifying winner and loser cryptogam species, and 3) Validating species occurrence and climate data through fieldwork.

This research will provide a foundation for conservation as these regions become progressively more ice- and snow-free, while strengthening currently fragmented Arctic and Antarctic research links and bringing together the polar research community.